Mission & Values

Flex Your Rights (Flex) is a 501(c)(3) educational nonprofit launched in 2002. We believe that citizens in a free and democratic society must actively shape the relationship between police and their community. That means people must be prepared to intelligently “flex” their constitutional rights when engaging with police. But whenever abuses occur, they must be empowered to file complaints that will be fairly investigated.

What We Do

Original Know-Your-Rights Media

Flex has produced a pair of popular educational movies. The most recent work, 10 Rules for Dealing with Police, is narrated by Billy Murphy, attorney for the family of Freddie Gray. Our movies are regularly screened in college and high school classrooms. They are also embraced by an array of civil liberties and law enforcement groups – including NAACP, ACLU, and various chiefs of police. Flex has distributed 40,000 DVDs and our YouTube channel has reached 44 million views.

OpenPolice.org: Upgrading Citizen Oversight of Police

OpenPolice.org is an open-source web app empowering citizens to prepare, file, and track reports of police conduct. The app helps users submit complaints or commendations to appropriate police oversight agencies. By allowing users to publish reports online, we aim to establish better public transparency and oversight of police activity across the United States.

Key Outcomes

In addition to changing individual lives for the better, our work fights injustices and disparities in the criminal justice system by…

• Building better case law by packing courts with more sympathetic and intelligent plaintiffs

• Empowering community activists to push back against unjust stop-and-frisks and other invasive police practices, and

• Influencing entire police departments to better respect citizens’ constitutional rights